Pleasant Valley Potato Inc. in Aberdeen, ID, now in its 27th year, was formed in 1988 by four family-owned potato farming operations in eastern Idaho, each of which have been growing Idaho potatoes for generations. The same four farms continue to own Pleasant Valley, and two of them are celebrating their 100th anniversary as growers of Idaho potatoes this year.

“The other two celebrated their 100th anniversary within the last five years,” said Ryan Wahlen, sales manager at Pleasant Valley Potato, in an interview with The Produce News Sept. 8.

The two farming operations that are celebrating 100 years this year are Val Wahlen Farms and Kim Wahlen Farms. Both of them were initially part of Wahlen Farms, which was started in 1914 by Ryan Wahlen’s great grandfather, Frederick Wahlen, a Swedish immigrant who “rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle up from Salt Lake in 1914 to homestead,” he said. “My grandfather’s name was Chester,” and his sons branched off on their own, two of them starting Val Wahlen Farms and Kim Wahlen Farms.

The other two grower-partners are Gehring Agri-Business, which celebrated its 100th anniversary two years ago, and Christensen Farms, which started two or three years prior to that.

Being grower-owned, Pleasant Valley is “a true grower-shipper in every sense of the word,” Wahlen said.

“The most important thing” for the company a focus on quality, he said. “It is difficult for a shipper who doesn’t grow their own potatoes to be consistent as far as quality is concerned. They are at the mercy of the open market and available supplies to the market.” Since the company’s owners grow everything that goes through the Pleasant Valley facility, “we know the growing areas the potatoes are coming from. We know the growers. We know that they know how to grow for the fresh market, and they grow with an eye to our customers’ needs and try to produce the best possible potatoes for them. There is value in that, and I think our customers have realized that, and because of that, they are loyal to us.”

Pleasant Valley specializes in russet potatoes, with volume split about 50-50 between Norkotahs and Burbanks. “We run Norkotahs through the fall and winter and Burbanks in the spring and summer,” Wahlen said. “We don’t grow any specialties … nor do we pack them.” However, the company does buy a few specialty potatoes from other grower-packers “to have on hand for our customers.”

Pleasant Valley’s potato acreage for the 2014 harvest is similar to past years. ”Our acreage doesn’t vary a lot,” Wahlen said. “We are on a three and four year crop rotation, so our acreage is fairly stable from one year to the next.”

Yields in the early harvest this year have been good but not as high as expected, due to cool, wet weather in August, and sizing appears to be below expectation, he said.

Due to the rains, there could be some issues with the storability of the crop in some cases, he said. But “for the most part, the quality should be good, and “when anyone sees that they have an issue going into storage, they will look for alternatives to move those potatoes” rather than send them to the fresh market.